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A mindless pixel-art top down shooter | Ailment: dead standoff - Full Review

1K View2023-02-09

Ailment: dead standoff is a single-stick top down corridor shooter with retro pixel-art and an interesting story as a bonus. Of course, if you see the word “dead” in the title, it better include zombies, and it does — with a twist.

🟩Pros

+A decent mindless shooter gameplay

+Nice enemy variety, including zombies with guns.

+This type of game needs no narrative, but it does have one anyway as a bonus

+Controller Support

🟥Cons

-The combat encounters at times are annoying, even borderline imbalanced because of the cramped space.

A nightmarish awakening

You play as Jonathan Reeves, an amnesiac waking up from cryosleep, on a space transporter ship called Frontier-16. He doesn’t remember anything, but somehow he already has a shotgun locked and loaded… Not too long after, zombies come for him – The ship is infected.

Jonathan Reeves is a man full of personality judging from his constant quips and monologuing, unfortunately the retro-pixel art style coupled with no voice acting leaves no room for expression aside from text bits that you can read and skip.

This aforementioned pixel art style is nicely looking though, with low resolution animations appeasing the retro gods and ominous sound bits complimenting the zombie survival tone. It somehow reminds me of Among Us, especially with the spaceship setting and survivalist premise.

Gameplay Analysis

The combat of Ailment: dead standoff is a single-stick shooter style, you just use one stick for movement, one for shooting/interaction and most of the targeting is done automatically. The controls are pretty responsive, but I find the character moves a bit too fast considering the small size of the hallways and corridors.

You can play Ailment: dead standoff in traditional touch controls, but you can also use supported physical controllers. I’ve tested it on Razer Kishi and it works out of the box.

You start off with a shotgun as your base weapon, and then, collect other weapons as “power-ups” that run out of ammo, or break down in time after prolonged use. I found it weird that a shotgun is the base weapon compared to the usual pistol or melee attack, maybe that’s their standard issue in these times?

Health, weapons, and upgrade pick-ups are scattered on the map, mostly inside lockers as a substitute for loot chests. There are different weapons that you can pick up like machine guns and laser guns. Not only you but your fellow crewmates can somehow still use weapons, even those that are infected.

Yes, zombies are using guns.

Some of these infected people are wielding guns of their own, shields, even missile launchers that you all have to avoid in order to survive. It gives off a nice enemy variety that mirrors the player’s arsenal and abilities, and not to overly rely on melee attacks as the go-to health depleter. From time to time, you will also encounter non-zombified NPCs that can follow you around, and die.

Thankfully aside from the zombie melee attacks, all ranged attacks are projectile-based and are avoidable to an extent. There is a bullet-hell element to Ailment: dead standoff, but it doesn’t exactly line up well with the top down corridor shooter gameplay; it becomes a hell of a challenge especially in narrow hallways and cramped rooms, to the point that many of the encounters are annoying, even borderline imbalanced.

There’s not much room available to evade these bullet-hell projectiles, as a result, any tactical or skill-based approach that would otherwise be viable has been eliminated, it just becomes a game of frantically running around hoping you won’t get hit. Ergo, Ailment: dead standoff is at its best when the enemies are melee or the encounters are on a spacious area.

The story is engaging and interesting, but it doesn’t interfere with the gameplay too much and mostly serves as background flavor to advance the gameplay from level to level.

Ailment: dead standoff is honestly a “brain dead” game where you don’t have to really pay attention to play it. Mindless fun, which is not a bad thing to have. Perfect for playing on the go and on mobile. This type of game needs no narrative, but it does have one anyway as a bonus and while the premise is as cliche as it gets — stranded on an zombie infested ship with amnesia — it's still a compelling one.

Is this a spaceship or a maze?

The levels are mostly linear and dungeon crawler-esque, clearing room to room, hallway to hallway with very minor back and forth-ing puzzle element involving finding out which numbered door a specific terminal opens, luckily you don’t have to remember these numbers thanks to a very helpful mini-map system to guide you in navigation. The game only saves at the beginning of each level, so death usually means a level restart — no checkpoints.

Ailment: dead standoff has a multiplayer mode too, but it's pretty detached from the single player experience. It generally feels like a shoehorned PvPvE deathmatch mode that puts you and other players on a level filled with the infected and power-ups. It can be fun to play with friends, if you can somehow convince them to play, but it's still not co-op which is disappointing to say the least.

Overall, Ailment: dead standoff is decent as a mindless arcade shooter to pass the time all while still providing a serviceable background level narrative experience on the side as a bonus. Just don’t expect deep combat mechanics and an immersive storytelling experience.

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